Bella needs a home

CRESTVIEW — A 200-pound pig with an even bigger personality is having trouble finding a new home. Bella, who was rescued as a piglet, has worn out her welcome at Tabatha Blackburn's farm.

"You can't make her do anything," Tabatha said. "She's not mean. She's friendly, will eat right out of your hand."

But if you push her in one direction, she'll go the other. The white pig with blue eyes is also an escape artist who goes where she wants to go, when she wants to go there.

On Saturday, her owners shopped her around to three possible new homes, no easy task with a less-than-portable pig. They lured her onto a horse blanket with a trail of potato chips and then hoisted her into a horse trailer with the help of Tabatha's son, a former college linebacker. It took four people to move one pig.

The first possible new owner rejected Bella, concerned that she might teach her pigs how to break out of fences. At the second destination — a rural branch of the Panhandle Animal Welfare Society — she was summarily rejected.

"I opened up the trailer door and he was like, 'Uh uh, no way," Tabatha said.

They stopped at a Tom Thumb, where an older woman saw Bella and was charmed. But when they took her to the woman's farm, her daughter nixed the idea.

When the Blackburns finally brought her back to the farm, Bella refused to get out of the trailer she had refused to get into several hours earlier.

"Nobody wanted to pick her back up," Tabatha said. "We had to push her down the ramp, squealing and screaming."

The ordeal left her owners frustrated. Bella, on the other hand, seemed pleased.